ATLAS ESSAY XXX

OF
PLACES
IN THE WORLD INTERIOR OF CAPITAL: 2005
TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF GLOBALIZATION
THE CRYSTAL PALACE

_PETER SLOTERDIJK

Among the 19th-century authors who, with critical reservation, observed the well-ad-
vanced games of aggressive global development from the periphery of “retarded” Eastern
Europe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky proved to be the most clear-sighted diagnostician. In his story
Notes from the Underground, published in 1864 – which not only represents the foundation
charter of modern ressentiment psychology, but also the first expression of opposition to
globalization, if the backdating of this expression is legitimate – there is a phrase that sum-
marizes, with unsurpassed metaphorical power, the world’s coming into the world at the
beginning of the end of the age of globalization: I mean his expression of Western civiliza-
tion as a “crystal palace.” During his stay in London in 1862, Dostoyevsky visited the palace
of the World Exhibition in South Kensington (which would surpass the scale of the Crystal
Palace of 1851) and, by intuition, he immediately grasped the immeasurable symbolic and
programmatic dimensions of the hybrid construction. Since the World Exhibition building
did not possess its own name, it seems reasonable to assume that Dostoyevsky applied the
term Crystal Palace to it.

The enormous original, a pre-fabricated building design, started to be constructed in the

fall of 1850 in London’s Hyde Park according to the plans of horticulture expert Joseph
Paxton, and was inaugurated on May 1st, 1851 in the presence of the young Queen Victoria
(only to be rebuilt with enlarged proportions in 1854 in the London suburb of Sydenham).
Until its destruction by a conflagration in 1936, it counted as a technological wonder of
the world – a triumph of serial fabrication planned with military precision. With it, a new
aesthetic of immersion began its victory march through modernity. What today we call
psychedelic capitalism, was already a fait accompli in the, as it were, immaterialized and
artificially temperature-controlled building. Around 17,000 exhibitors convened in it during
the first World Exhibition, of which 7,200 alone came from Great Britain and its thirty-two
colonies. With its construction, the principle of interiority crossed a critical threshold: from
then on, it signified neither the bourgeois or aristocratic dwelling, nor its projection into
the sphere of urban shopping arcades. Rather, it began to transpose the outside world as a
whole into a magical immanence transfigured by luxury and cosmopolitanism. After it had
been converted into a giant hothouse and an imperial cultural museum, it betrayed the con-
temporary tendency to make nature and culture jointly into indoors affairs. And although
the Crystal Palace was not initially conceived for musical performances, it developed into
a stage of singular concert performances and, with classical music programmes in front of
huge audiences, anticipated the era of pop concerts in stadiums.

Not long after, Dostoyevsky connected the skeptical impressions that his London visit had
left him to the intense aversion he felt after reading Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is To Be
Done?, published in 1863, and developed from this association of ideas the 19th century’s
most powerful vision of a critique of civilization. Famous for its time, (and of a resolutely
pro-Western tendency), and with consequences that would extend all the way to Lenin, this
book announced the “New Man” who, after accomplishing the technical solution to the so-
cial question, would live amongst his peers in a communal palace of glass and metal – the
archetype of shared accommodation in the East and the West. Chernyshevsky’s culture pal-
ace was conceived as a luxury edifice with an artificial climate, in which an eternal spring of
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consensus would prevail. Here, the sun of good intentions would shine day and night, the
peaceful coexistence of everyone with everyone would go without saying. Sentimentality
without limits would determine the interior climate, and an overextended humanitarian
house morale would necessarily lead to the spontaneous participation of everyone in the
fates of everyone else. For Dostoyevsky, the image of all “society” entering the palace
of civilization symbolized the will of the Western fraction of humanity to conclude, in a
posthistorical detente, the initiative it had launched towards world happiness and under-
standing among peoples. After the writer had, through his deportation to Siberia, become
acquainted with existence in a “house of the dead,” the perspective of a closed house of the
living revealed itself now to him: biopolitics begins as an enclosed structure.

At this point, the motive of the “end of history” begins its triumphal procession. The vision-
aries of the 19th century, like the communists in the 20th century, had already understood
that social life after the end of combatant history could only play out in an extensive interi-
or, an interior space ordered like a house and endowed with an artificial climate. Whatever
one may understand by the term real history, it should, like its spearheads, sea voyages
and expansionist wars, remain the perfect example of undertakings in the open air. But if
historical battles should lead to eternal peace, the whole of social life would have to be inte-
grated into a protective housing. Under such conditions, no further historical events could
occur, at most household accidents. Accordingly, there would be no more politics and no
more voters, but rather only contests for votes between parties and fluctuations among
their consumers. Who could deny that the Western world – particularly the European Union
after its relative completion in May and the signing of its constitution in October 2004 – em-
bodies today in its essential characteristics precisely such a great interior?

This gigantic hothouse of detente is dedicated to a cheerful and hectic cult of Baal, for
which the 20th century has proposed the term consumerism. The capitalistic Baal, which
Dostoyevsky thought he had recognized in the shocking sight of the World Exhibition Pal-
ace and the London pleasure-seeking masses, did not take shape any less in the building
itself than in the hedonistic turbulence that dominated its interior. Here, a new doctrine of
Final Things is formulated as a dogmatics of consumption. Upon the erection of the Crystal
Palace, only the “crystallization” of relations in their entirety could follow – with this fateful
term, Arnold Gehlen connected directly to Dostoyevsky. Crystallization designates the plan
to generalize boredom normatively and to prevent the renewed intrusion of “history” into
the posthistorical world. To encourage and protect benign paralysis is, in future, the goal of
all state power. By nature, the boredom guaranteed by the Constitution would dress itself
in the form of a project: its psychosocial jingle is the atmosphere of renewal, optimism its
basic key. In fact, in the posthistorical world, all the signs must point towards the future
because in it lies the only promise that can be made absolutely to an association of con-
sumers: that comfort does not stop flowing and growing. Therefore, the concept of human
rights is inseparable from the great march towards comfort, as long as the freedoms that
they signify prepare the self-fulfilment of consumers. Consequently, they are on everyone’s
lips only where the institutional, legal and psychodynamic foundation of consumerism is
to be erected.

However, it was Dostoyevsky’s firm conviction that eternal peace in the crystal palace could
only lead to the psychic exposure of its inhabitants. Detente, says the Christian psychol-
ogist, inevitably results in releasing evil in the human being. What was original sin is re-
vealed, in the climate of universal comfort, as a trivial freedom to do evil. Moreover, evil,
stripped of its historical pretexts and utilitarian accoutrements, can only crystallize into its
quintessential form in posthistorical boredom (skuka): purified of all excuses, it will now
be obvious, possibly surprising for the naive, that evil possesses the quality of pure whim.
It expresses itself as bottomless settlement, as an arbitrary taste for suffering and for let-
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ting-suffer, as roaming destruction with no specific motive. Modern evil is unemployed
negativity – an unmistakeable product of the posthistorical situation. Its popular edition
is sadomasochism in the middle-class household, where harmless people mutually bind
themselves to the bedposts to experience something new; its version of luxury is aesthetic
snobbism, which professes the primacy of accidental preference. In the youth markets,
where the prêt-à-revolter is distributed, this integrated evil appears cool. Value or non-val-
ue – both go by the results of the roll of the dice. Without a particular reason, in boredom,
the one is valued, the other rejected. Whether one, with Kant, calls this evil a radical evil, is
objectively inconsequential. Because its roots cannot reach deeper than the mood, nothing
is gained from the term “radical” – it makes an ontological theatrical clap of thunder in or-
der to explain that one does not know, ultimately, where evil comes from.

Is it still necessary to say that Heidegger’s great phenomenology of boredom, of 1929-

1930, can only be understood as breaking out of the crystal palace established across all of
Europe (although heavily battered by war damages), whose moral and cognitive interior
climate – the unavoidable absence of all valid convictions and the superfluity of all per-
sonal decisions-is more clearly grasped here than anywhere else? With his description of
inauthentic existence in Being and Time (1927), notably in the notorious paragraphs on the
“one” (which could have been inspired by Kierkegaard’s invectives against the “public” in
A Literary Review), Heidegger had prepared his investigation into the basic sensibilities of
the bored Dasein. It was here that the phenomenological revolt against the exigencies of
the sojourn in technical housing took shape. What is later called Ge-stell is for the first time
at this point extensively illuminated-above all with respect to the inauthentic existence,
deprived of itself. Where everyone is the other, and nobody is himself, the human being is
swindled out of his Ekstase, his loneliness, his own decision, his direct relationship to the
absolute outside, death. Mass culture, humanism, biologism are the lively masks behind
which is hidden, according to the philosopher’s insight, the deep boredom of Dasein with-
out challenge. The task of philosophy would thus be to burst the glass roof above one’s
own head, in order once again to bring the individual into immediate contact with the
monstrous.

Whoever remembers the Punk phenomenon, which haunted the youth cultures of the
1970s and 1980s, can recall a second example of the relationship between the fluid om-
nipresence of boredom and generalized aggression. To a certain extent, Heidegger was
the Punk-philosopher of the 1920s, an angry young intellectual who rattled the bars of or-
thodox philosophy (Schulphilosophie) – but not only those bars: he also shook the grilles
of urban comfort and the welfare state’s systems for dispossessing existence. In order to
appreciate his philosophical motives – that is, the temporal-logical core of his reflexion –
one has to recognize in them the attempt to mischievously redramatize the posthistorical
world of boredom – even at the expense of appointing the catastrophe as the schoolmis-
tress of life. In this sense, Heidegger might have said of the “national revolution,” in which
he briefly included himself, that an epoch of rehistorization was initiated in the here and
now and he was not only present, but he had even thought it in advance and had heroically
deduced its meaning. From Germany, the centre of contemplation, Heidegger, as the dra-
maturge of Being which is supposed to occur anew, articulates the postulate of escaping
the posthistorical dullness in order, as if at the last moment, to admit history once again;
“history,” let it be understood, is according to this logic not made, but rather medially suf-
fered. The Germans, as the only people capable of suffering the open and the monstrous,
were once again supposed to take flight in great style and summon the world to witness
their passion. According to the philosopher, it would have been incumbent upon them to
bring proof that in the midst of the comfortable and the arbitrary there still exists an “evi-
dence” that can command historical acts – an evidence that appears more in the attentive
ear than in the skeptical eye. For no one is looking out, but some hear a call from outside.
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Had the Germans accomplished what Heidegger’s fantasizing expected of them, then they
would have made friends and enemies understand that they are the ones whom the light
of necessity illuminates as if for the last time. But the irony of the situation intended that
the evidence change camps and take up quarters with the enemy: antifascism was really
the clearest thing that the epoch could offer from a moral perspective. To top it all, it allied
itself with the US-Americans, the paradigmatic emigrants from “history,” who, adding to
the total interior of the crystal palace, invented the posthistorical national and amusement
parks under the open sky.

The power of Dostoyevsky’s crystal palace metaphor for the philosophy of history is best
measured when juxtaposed with Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of the Parisian arcades.
The comparison is suggestive because in the one case as in the other an architectural form
was proclaimed as the key for the capitalistic condition of the world. Through synchronous
observation it becomes immediately clear why Benjamin falls behind Dostoyevsky, although
the latter was content with a rather laconic poetic vision, while the former immersed him-
self over many years in the study of his subject. Benjamin’s works on being-in-the-world
as the dazzlement of the capitalistic maya were, by the choice of its subject, condemned to
implausibility, especially since from the outset they ran the risk of explaining the current
situation by means of an anachronistic object: they focused on a type of building outdated
from an architectural, economic, urban and aesthetic point of view in order to load it with
the entire weight of a hermeneutics of capital; the well-known expression that he wished, in
view of the arcades, to write a “prehistory of the 19th century,” betrays Benjamin’s unclear
claim to seek the supratemporal in the obsolete. In all the expressive forms of the modern
financial context, Benjamin wanted to read the codes of alienation, as if not only the dear
Lord was hiding in the details, as believed by Spinozists and Warburgians, but also the ad-
versary. The ideology of detail nourished itself from the assumption that exchange value,
this otherwise seemingly invisible genius malignus of the modern world, took shape in the
ornamentation of wares and revealed itself in the arabesques of arcade architecture. Ac-
cording to such superstition of detail, Benjamin’s investigations seized up in underground
library studies, forced into a hopeless direction by a genius without freedom. The more
material they accumulated, the more they buried the fertile thought of the enterprise to lay
bare the interior and context-creating energy of the capitalistic modus vivendi. Benjamin’s
interpretation of the arcades was inspired by the realistic, albeit trivial, Marxist insight that
behind the gleaming surfaces of the world of merchandise, a rather unpleasant, sometimes
wretched work world was concealed; it was distorted by the suggestion that the capitalistic
global context was, as such, hell-inhabited by the damned who regrettably learn nothing
politically from their damnation. Through sombre allusions it was suggested that the lovely
world under glass was a metamorphosis of Dante’s inferno. Against this background, it
was not possible to conceptualize how a democratic reconstruction of the arcades could
take place or, even more, to clarify the question whether it would be conceivable or even
desirable for the “masses” to escape from the matrix or the “field” of capitalism. Seen as
a whole, Benjamin’s studies testify to the vindictive fortune of the melancholiac who com-
piles an archive of evidence for the waywardness of the world.

Should BenJamin’s important impulses for the 20th century and the early 21st be extended,
they would also have to, above and beyond several indispensable methodological rectifi-
cations, reorient themselves in the matter; they would have to measure themselves on the
architectural models of the present – above all the shopping malls (which, since the open-
ing of Southdale, close to Minneapolis, the first building complex of this type designed by
Victor Gruen in October 1954, spread like an epidemic across the USA and the rest of the
world), the convention centres, great hotels, sports arenas and indoor theme parks. Such
studies could sooner carry the title The Crystal Palace Project or The Hothouse Project, as
a last resort even The Space Station Project. Indisputably, the arcades embodied a sug-
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gestive spatial concept in the age of incipient consumerism – they fulfilled the fusion, so
stimulating for Benjamin, of salon and universe in a public interior; they were in the eyes
of the researcher the “temples of commodity capital,” “street[s] of lascivious commerce,” a
projection of the bazaar from the Orient into the bourgeois world and a symbol of the meta-
morphosis of all things in the light of purchasability – the stage of a féerie that magically
transforms the customer for the length of his stay into a virtual master of the world. The
Crystal Palace, however, the one near London that housed the World Exhibition and later
the amusement park (dedicated to “national education”), but also and even more the one
in Dostoyevsky’s text that was supposed to make “society” as a whole into an exhibit in it-
self, already indicated something that went well beyond arcade architecture. Benjamin cer-
tainly made frequent reference to the building, but wanted to recognize in it little more than
an enlarged arcade Gust as he also only saw “cities of arcades” in Fourier’s installations
for utopian communities) – here, his admirable physiognomic sight left him in the lurch. He
disobeyed the basic rule of media analysis, according to which the format is the message.
For while the elite arcades, which never exceeded smaller and medium dimensions, served
to make the world of merchandise cozy [gemütlich] and its mise-en-scène glamorous in a
covered promenade, the enormous Crystal Palace – the valid prophetic building form of
the 19th century (which was immediately copied around the world) – already pointed to an
integral, experience-oriented, popular capitalism, in which nothing less was at stake than
the complete absorption of the outer world into an inner space that was calculated through
and through. The arcades constituted a canopied intermezzo between streets and squares;
the Crystal Palace, in contrast, already conjured up the idea of a building that would be spa-
cious enough in order, perhaps, never to have to leave it again. (A possibility that Dosto-
yevsky played out with the thought experiment of the “enclosed palace” in his The House
of the Dead.) Its increasing integrativity [Integretivität] did not, admittedly, serve to elevate
capitalism to the rank o f a religion that universalizes fault and debts, as Benjamin assumed
in an eccentric early note, it led, on the contrary, to the replacement of the psychosemantic
protective shield, proposed by historical religions, through systems of the activist provi-
sion of public services [Daseinsvorsorge]. This more abstract and bigger interior cannot be
made visible with the methods of Benjaminian treasure-seeking in libraries.

If one has accepted the metaphor “Crystal Palace” as an emblem for the final ambitions
of modernity, one can then restate the frequently noted and frequently denied symmetry
between the capitalistic and socialistic programme: socialism-communism was simply the
second construction site of the palace project. After its conclusion, it became obvious that
communism was one step on the path towards consumerism. In its capitalistic interpreta-
tion, the currents of desire blossom with incomparably more power-something that is grad-
ually admitted as well by those who had bought socialism stocks at the exchange of illu-
sions, stocks of which one will keep several examples like the yellowed German one-billion
Reichsmark bills from the year 1923. Of capitalism, on the other hand, one can only say now
that it always already meant more than simply a production relation; its imprinting force
[Prägekraft] always went much further than the figure of thought “world market” is able to
indicate. It implies the project of transposing the entire life of work, wishes, and expression
of the people that it has captured into the immanence of purchasing power.